Friday, May 13, 2011

Fat Frogs on a Skinny Log

I love finding fun art projects from books we've read. I have a great book called "Fat Frogs on a Skinny Log" by Sara Riches. If you don't have this book you could read another frog story or simply ask them to imagine what would happen if a bunch of fat frogs all tried to jump on the same slippery log.

We began with a large piece of white paper and coloured it in with light and dark blue pastel.

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﻿Next the kids were given a brown piece of construction paper and were to cut out a log. They coloured it in with brown, black, orange and green pastels.

﻿I handed all the kids a white square of paper for drawing their frogs. I took them through a simple drawing of the frog but let them be creative and make changes if they wanted to make it more unique.

I let the kids make 2 to 5 frogs to p﻿ut on the log. I told them to vary the expressions of the frog. One could be happy to be on the log, the other could be angry to have to share the log. Once the frogs were drawn, they outined them in black marker and coloured them in with pencil crayons. When cutting the frogs out, I showed the class how to cut around the frog leaving a little bit of white so that the eyebrows and toes weren't accidentally cut off and showed up better with a little edging to them.

The next step was to glue the frogs on the log.

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Then I had the kids add a lilypad (draw a heart with a rounded bottom). they drew it on white paper and coloured it in with pencil crayon, then added some yellow pastel. I showed them how to make water drops and shading under were the log tipped up from the weight of the frogs.